As you may or may not be aware, the folks at Alberta Partnerships in Injury Reduction (PIR) are requiring Certifying Partners (CPs) to amend their Certificate of Recognition (COR) audit protocols by January 1, 2019.
The main updates are in the area of senior manager and supervisor knowledge of their responsibilities and their health and safety programs. The new practices will also include an emphasis on site-specific hazard assessments.
Most CPs are trying to make their new audit standards available for voluntary use well before the deadline in 2019. This is in an effort to reduce the shock on companies needing to establish or improve their directive or report documents prior to being scrutinized during renewal audits. The hope is that companies will use the new benchmarks in their maintenance audit years, to define variances in their programs, compared to the updated tool.
2019 Partnerships Audit Protocol Availability
The Alberta Association for Safety Partnerships (www.aasp.ca) is adopting, in its entirety, the PIR’s standard. This new audit tool is supposed to be available for use in mid to late summer 2017.
According to the Alberta Municipal Health and Safety Association (www.amhsa.net) website, their new audit rule should be approved by Partnerships and be available for use in early 2017. At the time of writing, this tool was not available for use.
During a presentation to the Alberta Occupational Safety Auditors Association (www.aosaa.ca), Juliet Goodwin, Manager of Safety Audit and Certification at Enform (www.enform.ca), explained that their new audit instrument would not be available for use until shortly before the deadline of January 1, 2019.
Change is Good
It is encouraging to see the government is requiring the CPs to better their audit procedures on a regular basis moving forward. Times and trends rapidly change, and so should health and safety management evaluation systems. Although this can be challenging for front-line health and safety practitioners, it is necessary to promote continuous improvement and to protect the health and safety of workers.
Variance Evaluations
As the new audit protocols become available we, at Constant Safety Inc., will be making gap analysis templates available for companies to gauge their compliance. Drop us a line, we will be happy to forward a copy to you. Currently, the AASP/Partnerships audit tool is available for download from our site (http://constantsafety.com).